Torchlight XBLA Review

Robin Meijer of Elder-Geek.com writes: "The once-popular genre of “Dungeon Crawlers” has almost entirely died out in the recent decade. Aside from the elusive Diablo III, it almost seemed like there would be no more single-player focused games where players would travel from town to town in (usually) a fantasy-themed world, carving their ways through dungeon after dungeon filled with enemies, and continuously upgrading the equipment of their ever-evolving characters. The only option open to fans of the genre seemed to be to sign up for an one of the many MMORPGs, which have incorporated many of the elements once found in these games.

Runic Games, a studio formed of former Blizzard North and Flagship Studios employees, released Torchlight in October 2009. It was a game reminiscent of classic dungeon crawlers like Diablo, Dungeon Siege, and the Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance series… though it condensed these classics into a “light” experience. Still, the game became a tremendous success on the PC. Now, almost one and a half years after the game was originally released, the game has finally made it’s way onto the Xbox Live Arcade.

Seeing as most dungeon crawlers were specifically designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard, one might expect that a console-adaptation of such games would end up to be but a shadow of the original version. Developer Runic Games has addressed this issue by entirely overhauling the control scheme for the game, and making additional changes to several key-aspects of the game, which has resulted in an excellent downloadable title."